Originally Posted by
asgelle
Originally Posted by
LowCel
Actually NP is more involved than just giving you what your power is during the time you are pedalling. It somehow figures out what you "could have done" during the whole ride if you had gone all out and done the same power the entire time. Well, something like that. It is confusing as hell.
Right, there are some calculations involved when figuring out NP/xPower. Coggan/Allen's NP takes the 4th power of all 30-sec rolling-average power numbers, averages those, and then takes the 4th root of that number to get the NP, while xPower is comparable but is calculated a little differently. The point is that it kinda cancels out the zeroes (or at least makes them less of a factor).